Racial Prejudice Contradicts the Gospel

THE WORD

Before you dismiss this as a political conversation and move on to a devotional topic more comfortable for you — stop. What Paul declares in Galatians 3:28 is not a social justice platform grafted onto the gospel as a cultural accommodation. It is the organic, direct, theological implication of the gospel itself. In the century Paul wrote this letter, the division between Jew and Greek was not merely cultural — it was considered divinely ordained by many religious authorities, enforced by strict social codes, and so deeply embedded in the culture of the day that Jewish believers and Gentile believers were struggling to share the same table. And Paul's response to that struggle was not sensitivity training or diversity programming. It was a theological declaration: in Christ Jesus, those categories have been abolished. Not softened. Not managed. Abolished. The cross creates a new humanity that the old categories cannot contain, cannot divide, and cannot legitimately govern.

The same declaration applies to you — in your racial attitudes, your cultural assumptions, your unconscious hierarchies of worth and belonging, your gut-level comfort with some people and instinctive unease with others based on their ethnicity, their language, their cultural expression, or their socioeconomic background. Racial prejudice in the body of Christ is not a personality quirk or a cultural inheritance that the gospel politely overlooks. It is a direct contradiction of what the cross accomplished. Ephesians 2:14–16 makes this explicit: Christ "has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility... that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace." The wall between ethnic groups was demolished at Calvary. When you maintain it — in your heart, in your church culture, in your social circles, in your assumptions about people of a different race — you are rebuilding what Christ destroyed. You are undoing in your life what the cross accomplished at ultimate cost. This confrontation is personal.

‘One in Christ’ does not mean pretending race has no social consequences. The gospel confronts contempt, segregation, unequal access, biased systems, and theology built to protect dominance. Unity honors cultural particularity while requiring truthful listening, shared power, repair, justice, and equal dignity in the body of Christ.